Career

Author of novels, including:
The Tenth Justice,
1997;
Dead Even,
1998;
The First Counsel,
2001;
The Millionaires,
2002;
The Zero Game,
2004. Cocreator and a writer and producer on
Jack & Bobby,
WB Network, 2004-05. Actor in the Woody Allen film
Celebrity,
1998. Writer of
Green Arrow: The Archer's Quest,
book version of issues of the comic book
Green Arrow,
2003; wrote the comic book series
Identity Crisis,
2004.

Sidelights

In 2004, Brad Meltzer proved the breadth of his writing talent with three
very different successes: his fifth novel, the thriller
The Zero Game,
was released; he wrote a comic-book series for DC Comics; and he saw a
television show he co-created,
Jack & Bobby,
debut on the WB television network. His thrillers, with well-researched
details and often set in Washington, D.C. politics, have attracted such
attention that a United States Senator wrote the introduction to the book
version of another of his comic-book projects.

Brad Meltzer

Meltzer grew up in Brooklyn and Miami. His father, the son of a Jewish
immigrant, worked in the garment industry until 1983, when the family
moved to Florida. There, his father started selling insurance, and his
mother got work in a furniture store. Writing was always a big part of
Meltzer's life, even if he did not quite realize it. He got into
the University of Michigan in part by writing his application letter as a
love letter to the school. He told the
Chicago Tribune
's Web Behrens, "Even when I was in junior high school, high
school, college, anytime I had to write an essay, I would always go up to
the teacher and say, 'You know what? Rather than comparing Freud
and Erikson in an expository essay, can I send them on a picnic and let
them get in a fight with each other and just write the dialogue?'
Invariably, every teacher would say yes. I did that all the time."

At age 19, while in college, Meltzer went to Washington, D.C. for an
internship on Capitol Hill, an experience that would influence much of his
future writing. When he graduated in 1993, he got a job offer from
Games
magazine and moved to Boston to take it, but the publisher he had wanted
to work with soon left the magazine, so Meltzer put his energies into
writing a novel instead. That novel, called
Fraternity,
was rejected 24 times and never published. But Meltzer resolved to write
a second
novel, and he did so while going to Columbia Law School. (Attending law
school with him was his high-school sweetheart, Cori, whom he married.)

The new book,
The Tenth Justice,
about a Supreme Court clerk who accidentally reveals an important
decision before it is announced, was published in 1997 and became a
best-seller, so Meltzer continued with his writing career and never
practiced law.
People
reviewer Pam Lambert noted that Meltzer's characters were not as
rich as his plot but declared that Meltzer showed "a
veteran's panache with plot and pacing" and had
"earned the right to belly up to the bar in the company of John
Grisham, Scott Turow, and David Baldacci, and join the growing ranks of
attorneys making their cases on the bestseller list."

Meltzer says research is key to his writing. "You can invent all
the stuff you want, but if it doesn't smell real, readers will know
in a nanosecond," he said in a question-and-answer page on his
website. "To me, fiction is at its best when it has one foot in
reality." When he decided one of the characters in his 2004 novel
The Zero Game
would be a young, black, female Senate page, he spent months researching,
interviewing people, and talking with friends, trying to perfect the
character. He spent so much time researching what it was like to be one of
the president's children for
The First Counsel,
his 2001 novel about a White House lawyer who dates the
president's daughter, that he also wrote an article of advice for
President George W. Bush's daughters Jenna and Barbara for
USA Weekend
. As part of his research, Meltzer contacted every living daughter of a
president, and one (he will not say who) agreed to talk with him. Friends
who worked in the White House let him in and showed him around, and a
former Secret Service agent who had enjoyed
The Tenth Justice
also helped him.

In the book, the lawyer and First Daughter slip into tunnels under the
White House to evade Secret Service agents who are supposed to watch her.
Such details about Washington landmarks in his books are probably one
reason he was consulted by the Department of Homeland Security's
Analytic Red Cell office, which brings together people from outside the
department to brainstorm about how to prevent possible future terrorist
tactics. "When I got the call, I was floored," Meltzer told
the
Washington Post
's John Mintz. "They said, 'We want people who think
differently from the ones we have on staff.'" Meltzer signed
an agreement not to talk about the hypothetical situation he helped
discuss, but he told the newspaper that his panel also included FBI and
CIA employees, a psychologist, a professor who studies Middle Eastern
terrorism, and a philosopher.

In his 2002 book
The Millionaires,
Meltzer veered away from Washington thrillers to tell a bank-robbing
story. The millionaires in the title are two brothers who work at a bank,
Oliver and Charlie, one responsible and ambitious, the other a free
spirit. They decide to transfer an unclaimed $3 million into their bank
account, triggering a chase and intrigue involving Secret Service agents,
an insurance investigator, and a mysterious woman. Reviewer Ron Bernas,
writing in the
Chicago Tribune,
declared that the brothers' relationship lifted the book above the
average thriller.

Meanwhile, Meltzer also wrote some issues of the comic book
Green Arrow.
"I thought about saying no. My wife reminded me I'd been
waiting my whole life to do this," he said in an interview with the
website BookReporter.com. Comic books influenced his writing, much as
classic mystery and thriller writers Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
did, he explained. "I was raised on comic books," Meltzer
told the
Chicago Tribune
's Behrens. "Those were my first serials. You had 22 pages
and you had a cliffhanger. So it's no shock to me that [in novels]
I like to write a chapter, tell a story, leave a cliffhanger and go to the
next chapter. It's not a conscious choice; it's second
nature." His issues of
Green Arrow
were published in graphic novel form as
Green Arrow: The Archer's Quest
in 2003; United States Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont wrote the
introduction.

Meltzer's career peak in 2004 included a return to Washington
thrillers with
The Zero Game,
a novel about a betting pool on votes in Congress that grows into a
murder story. Scenes take place in the United States Capitol, including
its basement and hidden rooms for senators and congressmen—all of
which were inspired by his explorations of the Capitol during his college
internship. During his research, he also explored an 8,000-feet deep gold
mine. In addition, he asked uncomfortable questions about a connection
between plutonium, the radioactive element often used in nuclear weapons,
and the neutrino, a subatomic particle. Because of the questions, a good
source of his at a government scientific facility stopped calling him back
and asked Meltzer to take his name out of the book's
acknowledgements.

Not everyone liked
The Zero Game.
"Meltzer's description of how items get into an
appropriations bill and the power of congressional staffers to make things
happen is informative," reviewer Ann Hellmuth wrote in the
Chicago Tribune.
"But once the bodies start falling, it is all downhill for
The Zero Game.
It's a stereotypical chase story, where the protagonists
escape death by inches, foil villains and keep moving non-stop through
the pages with little rhyme or reason."

Also in 2004, the WB Network debuted a television series Meltzer developed
with his friend Steven "Scoop" Cohen. The series,
Jack & Bobby,
was about two teenage brothers, one of whom will grow up to be president.
It showed Bobby (the future president) as a solitary kid, interspersed
with documentary-style glimpses from the future, in which people
commenting about Bobby's time as president look back on his early
life. (The series attracted some critical acclaim and a Golden Globe
nomination, but was cancelled after one season.) At the same time, DC
Comics was publishing the comic-book series
Identity Crisis,
a murder mystery written by Meltzer that included an all-star lineup of
DC Comics characters, including Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
Wizard
magazine called it the "most anticipated comic book project for
2004," according to Meltzer's website.

"I want to explore the emotional cost of putting on a cape,"
Meltzer told
Entertainment Weekly.
The magazine was impressed with the results. Reviewer Tom Russo noted
that most "event" projects in comics featuring big-name
writers or several comic heroes sacrifice character development for
extreme action. But Meltzer, Russo wrote, "seems quite willing to
resist the temptation to have big, loud, pointless fun with the legends at
his disposal.
Identity Crisis
focuses on lesser-known DC characters, including the Elongated Man, and
shows how they react when some of the superheroes' loved ones are
murdered. "The effect is to underscore that these are very human
characters engaged in a very risky business," Russo noted
approvingly.

Meltzer, who lived for years in Montgomery County, Maryland, near
Washington, D.C, now lives in Miami with his wife, Cori, and their son.